What they mean is that after they pay for their nice house in the suburbs, send their three kids to private school, pay their monthly payment for their Mercedes and BMW, and take their two annual vacations, there’s hardly anything left over to save. It’s hard, guys!
And never forget those benefits are insane and most last until the day they die.
Not to mention all the deals they make that net them literally millions.
Exactly. Also, you have to factor in that many of them don’t want to uproot their families, so they’re paying the mortgage on a $500K+ home in whatever state they came from for their family to reside in, then another $4000 a month to rent a nice condo for themselves in D.C. where they can hook up with their mistress on weekends they don’t head home. Oh, and a mistress isn’t cheap. They expect to be wined and dined at exclusive places, showered with small but expensive gifts, and if they’re worth keeping long term, they expect the lease on a nice BMW or Mercedes to be paid as well.
I mean, when you factor all that in, $174K just doesn’t cut it. Thank goodness we have so many concerned lobbyists in D.C. willing to donate to ease the burden of our country’s congressmen. For just a few thousand dollars a day, you too can help give a member of Congress the life they deserve.
-Cue Sarah McLachlan song-
Eh, I think they’re terribly underpaid. Sure the job might land you a sweet lobbyist gig down the line…but it really might not, too.
I’m all for setting a salary for the office that makes it a job people want to have, just for the job itself, and not what it means as a lever to potential special interest group cash either while in office or after the fact.
If someone is motivated to public service because they want to be rich, they are gonna suck at that job no matter how they are getting their money.
Nobody who had “be rich” as a number 1 goal would ever go into high-level politics. There are easier ways. Congress is for people who want power and respect or fame. Some even legitimately want to help others.
But regardless, people are motivated by money. Just because it’s not #1 on the list doesn’t mean it isn’t in the top 10. I would argue it’s in the top 10 for virtually all Americans when considering career choices.
I live in a state (Nebraska) that doesn’t pay state legislators diddly. It’s something like 10k-15k a year plus marginal bennies. So it’s not a job that one can realistically do unless one is:
- Independently wealthy. Oh great, just the people we want to encourage to take elected office. The wealthy are so under-represented in politics.
- An established professional or business owner who can maintain an income while still devoting a hell of a lot of working days to legislative business. See above for why these people are a great idea.
- An up and coming young politician who is used to being broke from college, willing to work at Target in the evenings/weekends to pay rent on an apartment, and wants to make a name. I’m not making this up, Nebraska has several state senators like this. State legislature is treated as an entry level job because it’s paid like one.
- Crooked. Willing to take funny money in shady ways to make legislature pay.
Do any of those sound like ideal candidates for office?
I realize that the DC problem isn’t nearly as acute as the Nebraska problem, but underpaying elected officials in regards to other career choices easily available to people of that education and experience just limits the pool of potential candidates for no good reason.
They aren’t and don’t, generally speaking. Is there something specific you would like to claim is insane and lasts for life?
Reason takes a look at the bankrupt policy statements of the GOP
Trump, who campaigned as the guy who would actually go through with the things Republicans had half-heartedly promised for decades (Move the Israel embassy to Jerusalem! Get those illegals to self-deport! Withdraw from gutless international institutions! Threaten North Korea with extinction!), has in recent weeks repeatedly used such actions as a way to call the Beltway GOP’s own bluff…
…The bad news is that many of the GOP’s underlying ideas, or at least the policies they claimed to care about, are not sound. One wonders, when watching Republicans flinch in the face of their politics veering dangerously close to policy, whether it’s nothing more than the instinctual recoil of Dr. Frankenstein encountering his own monster.
In other words, bitching about stuff is easy, fixing it and governing is hard.
And of course he didn’t divest of his assets in Manhattan, no blind trust, etc.
So apparently Bannon is trash-talking GWB at the CAGOP thing. Mostly those mean things he said about white supremacists.
Replace ‘President’ with ‘Allah’ and this sounds like an ISIS propaganda video
Just like the last one did.
More CAGOP stuff:
Rick Wilson is fairly sure the GOP is going to split between conservatives and white nationalists.
He’s mentioned it more than a few times, CAGOP seems to hint that he might be right.
I’m tired of chasing the right’s insanity. I know how I’m gonna vote, and I’ll march when the big marches happen. If they want to take their stupid fucking guns and put me up against the wall there’s not much I can do about it. In the end all you can hope is there are more sane people than psychos-with-megaphones.
I miss watching Quayle’s son proclaiming Obama the worst president in all of American history back in the summer of 09. The Right sure owns measured, tasteful respect of our institutions and norms.
Yes. I don’t follow people who are not celebrities who have more than 10,000 followers. Really I’m uncomfortable with the 1k-10k range too, but many of the people I follow are writers who do a certain amount of promotion online along with the other things they say. Some of them are okay despite having 2k or 4k followers. But 10k+ basically means someone who has purchased their followers, someone who is purely involved in marketing and someone who never has anything interesting to say, only using their account for advertising and saccharine retweets.
Just to stick up for him, my kid is in that range and I 1000% promise he doesn’t buy followers (he’s in the international affairs/conflict studies realm of things). But you’re right, many people do the higher they get.
Oh sure, there’s lots of ways to get followers without grubbing for them. Just that too many seems to suggest excessive self-promotion on average. But some people are just very clever in 140 (or 280!) chars and naturally gain followers, while others have circles of the type that interconnect. I mean, I have 500 myself without much effort: @lbrothers :)